http://www.eit.com/software/winterp/winterp.html (WINTERP home page)

Niels P. Mayer ([email protected])
Thu, 30 Jun 1994 09:26:04 -0700


In some previous articles on this list ("object oriented data models and
client side CGI" and "PROPOSAL: "W3A" - a client-side applets API"), Dan
Connolly ([email protected]) has mentioned WINTERP 2.0 as an alternative to
Tcl/Tk or Python as a development/delivery/extensibility environment for
WWW applications. WINTERP -- the OSF/Motif Widget INTERPreter -- is an
interactive, extensible, object-oriented environment for creating GUI-based
applications (OSF/Motif) and features powerful new object-oriented 2.5D
graphics and animation capabilities (Xtango). WINTERP 2.0 was recently
released on the X Consortium X11r6 "contrib" distribution and is freely
available by anonymous ftp.

Due to lack of time, I haven't had an opportunity to post my opinions on
WINTERP 2.0's advantages over Python or Tcl/Tk for doing client-side
processing and on-the-fly-contruction of UIs. Given that I'm soon leaving
town on vacation, I now really don't have time...

Instead, I figured I'd take the opportunity to give you all a pointer to
the WINTERP 2.0 world-wide-web home page. While you're at it, you may be
interested in checking out a paper describing EIT's WWW Authoring
Environment, which is built on top of WINTERP 2.0 --
http://www.eit.com/papers/gpware94/paper.html.
See the figures in this paper for some examples of UIs built in WINTERP 2.0.

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Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.intrinsics,comp.windows.x.apps,comp.comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.lisp.x,comp.lang.tcl,comp.lang.python,comp.lang.dylan,comp.lang.scheme,comp.graphics
Subject: http://www.eit.com/software/winterp/winterp.html (WINTERP home page)
Distribution: inet

For those of you with World Wide Web browsers (e.g. Mosaic), I've just
created a home page for WINTERP 2.0 (OSF/Motif Widget INTERPreter). WINTERP
is a rapid prototyping, development and delivery environment for GUI-based
applications on Unix platforms. WINTERP fills the same needs as TCL/TK or
Python (or the windowing korn shell) but:
(0) Provides a complete, object-oriented user-interface toolkit based on
the standard OSF/Motif widget set and the X toolkit.
(1) Uses a small, portable object-oriented Lisp interpreter
(an event-driven version of Betz/Almy/Tierney-et-al's XLISP-PLUS).
(2) Other applications may send programmatic commands to WINTERP's
interpreter via unix domain or internet domain sockets.
(3) High-level object-oriented 2.5D graphics and animation based on
Stasko and Hayes' Xtango path transition animation paradigm.
(4) nonblocking GUI interfaces to multiple asynchronous interactive Unix
subprocess (based on Don Libes' expect library with WINTERP extensions).

Best of all, WINTERP 2.0 is a "one stop shopping" free application
environment -- the full system (C-source, documentation, example programs)
is available in one tar file -- you don't have to run around the net
integrating interpreter, interface and "accessory" packages. Just add Motif
1.2, Unix, a C compiler, berkeley networking facilities (unix domain
sockets), and X11r5 or X11r6... compile, and you're good to go. The system
is quite portable -- so far, I know that WINTERP 2.0 works on Irix, Ultrix,
OSF1, SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, Linux, NeXT-Step (w/ Co-Xist Motif/X), etc.

Anyways... the home page is accessible via the following URL:
http://www.eit.com/software/winterp/winterp.html
a copy of the page is also available from the X Consortium Ftp site:
file://ftp.x.org/contrib/devel_tools/winterp.html

Expect this page to change/improve sometime after I return from vacation on
July 15. In particular, I plan to provide a HTML version of the WINTERP
documentation. And a page describing each of the WINTERP example
applications, with hypertext pointers to a screendump (GIF) of each
application and the code that created the screen. (Over 200 example
applications/UIs and test scripts are included with the WINTERP
distribution).

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
= Niels Mayer ..... [email protected] .... http://www.eit.com/people/mayer.html =
= Multimedia Engineering Collaboration Environment (MM authoring for WWW) =
= Enterprise Integration Technologies, 459 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto CA 94301 =
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